Catherine G. Penney

Modality effects and the structure of short-term verbal memory

The effects of auditory and visual presentation upon short-term retention of verbal stimuli are reviewed, and a model of the structure of short-term memory is presented. The main assumption of the model is that verbal information presented to the auditory and visual modalities is processed in separate streams that have different properties and capabilities. Auditory items are automatically encoded in both the A (acoustic) code, which, in the absence of subsequent input, can be maintained for some time without deliberate allocation of attention, and a P (phonological) code. Visual items are retained in both the P code and a visual code. Within the auditory stream, successive items are strongly associated; in contrast, in the visual modality, it is simultaneously presented items that are strongly associated. These assumptions about the structure of short-term verbal memory are shown to account for many of the observed effects of presentation morality.

Teaching Decoding Skills to Poor Readers in High School

Thirty-three poor readers participated in an experimental test of a method to teach decoding skills. Twenty-one students in the experimental condition were given approximately 18 sessions of individual tutoring in which they practiced associations between letter patterns and pronunciations for pronounceable parts of words. A control group of 12 students remained in their class instead of receiving the tutoring program. Standardized tests of word identification, word attack, and passage comprehension were administered before and after the tutoring program. Analyses of covariance were used to compare performance of experimental and control participants on the reading measures. Students in the experimental group showed greater improvements on all measures than did students in the control condition when the effects of initial scores were statistically controlled.

Modality effects in delayed free recall and recognition: visual is better than auditory.

During presentation of auditory and visual lists of words, different groups of subjects generated words that either rhymed with the presented words or that were associates. Immediately after list presentation, subjects recalled either the presented or the generated words. After presentation and test of all lists, a final free recall test and a recognition test were given. Visual presentation generally produced higher recall and recognition than did auditory presentation for both encoding conditions. The results are not consistent with explanations of modality effects in terms of echoic memory or greater temporal distinctiveness of auditory items. The results are more in line with the separate-streams hypothesis, which argues for different kinds of input processing for auditory and visual items.

Suffix Effects in Lists of Temporally Grouped Words

Two groups of university students were presented with auditory lists of temporally grouped words for recall. The lists were immediately followed by either a redundant suffix, a nonredundant suffix or no suffix. One group of subjects was instructed to recall the items in strict serial order; the second group was required to write the last items first, indicating the position of all items in the list. According to Kahnemans (1973) account of the suffix effect, the interfering effect of the suffix should be eliminated when the suffix is segregated in a different group or perceptual unit from the memory items. The results did not support the prediction from Kahnemans hypothesis. An alternative account of the suffix effect was presented.

Recall mode and recency in immediate serial recall: Computer users beware!

Two experiments were carried out in which subjects were tested on immediate serial recall of digit lists. In both experiments, some subjects wrote their responses on paper, and other subjects entered their responses by means of a computer keyboard. In both experiments, keyboard entry of responses resulted in lower recall of items from the recency part of the serial-position curve, and in the second experiment, the difference between the two response modes was greater when lists had been presented visually rather than auditorily. The auditory suffix effect was not diminished by keyboard entry of responses. Investigators of recency effects in serial recall are cautioned about using keyboard entry of responses.

Unusual modality effects in less-skilled readers.

University students who were skilled or less-skilled readers were compared on tests of auditory information processing and immediate serial recall of auditory and visual digits. Reading skill was defined by performance on a pseudoword reading task. The good readers exhibited typical modality effects with higher recall of auditory than visual items from the last 3 serial positions. On the terminal list item, the less-skilled readers showed a modality effect comparable with that of the skilled readers, but on other list items the modality effect reversed and a visual superiority was obtained. Results were discussed in terms of C. G. Penneys (1989) separate-streams model of short-term verbal memory.

A beneficial effect of part-list cuing with unrelated words

Previous experiments have found no beneficial effect of providing some list items as retrieval cues for other words in the list. This finding contradicts organizational theory, which predicts a positive effect of intralist cues on recall. The hypothesis tested in the present study was that intralist cues would increase recall when the following conditions are met: (1) subjects form integrated subjective units during learning, (2) not all of these units are recalled in the absence of cues, and (3) appropriate retrieval cues are selected to access these units. University students sorted a list of 64 unrelated words into subjective categories and then attempted to recall the words. For cued recall trials, one word from each subjective unit was chosen as a cue. More target words were recalled in cued recall than in free recall. This finding is consistent with organizational theory and indicates that experiments that found no beneficial effects of intralist cues did not employ optimal organization and cuing conditions.

A possible contribution of word-retrieval difficulties to reading and spelling impairments

Abstract Good and poor readers at the junior high school level and good and poor spellers at the university level were compared on their ability to produce words in response to a semantic cue (a category name), a visual cue (three letters), and an auditory cue (a syllable rime). Kindergarten children were tested on a word-identification task and their retrieval of words in response to the semantic and auditory cues. At all ages, poor readers or spellers produced fewer words on all word-retrieval tasks than did good readers or spellers. Performance on the auditory and visual word-retrieval tasks correlated very highly with pseudoword reading and spelling ability in the two older groups; in the kindergarten children, auditory retrieval correlated with word identification. The results suggest that poor readers have not organized words in long-term memory according to rhyming families but that good readers have. We speculate that failure to retrieve rhyming words during acquisition of reading and spelling skills underlies the failure of poor readers and spellers to abstract the higher-order relationships between orthography and phonology.

Phonological processing deficits and the acquisition of the alphabetic principle in a severely delayed reader: a case study

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and then later for the final consonant in a word but had difficulty with letter-sound associations for vowels. TMs ability to select a printed word to match a spoken word on the basis of the initial or final letter and sound was interpreted as evidence of Ehris phonetic-cue reading. Using the Glass Analysis method, the authors taught TM to read and he became an independent reader. We discuss how his phonological processing deficits contributed to his reading difficulties.

Paired associate and sequential probes in dichotic memory.

Paired associate (PA) and sequential (SQ) probes were compared in two experiments in which lists of four (Experiment I) or five (Experiment II) pairs were presented dichotically. The SQ probe gave higher recall for early list items while the PA probe was superior for the last serial position. The effects of presentation rate and a nonredundant suffix were typical in the PA probe conditions but were not systematic in the SQ conditions. The data were discussed in terms of the sequential association hypothesis and the importance of considering the subject’s processing strategies in interpreting rate and interference effects in memory.